tranquil garden :: the ambient music thread

[watermoon]

a place for ambient music discussion, sharing, categorization.
a place to imagine your troubles swept away by the sea breeze, cast off amidst the stars, left behind deep within the forest.
it'll be ok. you're safe here.

---

for the past however-long i've had this desire to make ambient music playlists to exist within. i like the idea of crafting sonic environments where songs flow endlessly into each other without repeating noticeably often. and doing this has got me thinking about different types of environments one could craft. you could have forest ambient, space ambient, garden ambient, spa ambient, business meeting ambient, empty street ambient…
though my challenge is that, past an artist that i can use as a guiding star for each type, pairing enough music with it to create this feeling of endlessness is difficult. i need more to listen to. i can't get enough of this shit. and that's where you come in! send me your ambient favorites!

perhaps my one request then, for the sake of worldbuilding, would be to pair suggestions with the environment you feel like the song could exist in.

[maru]

There's this artist called 0360 on Bandcamp who makes the loveliest stuff. She took it all down but I can see now she has an archive uploaded. I recommend 'april' but it's all really good. I kind of preferred when it was segregated by album...

Otherwise, you know what I like. Hiroshi Yoshimura. I'll dig up some deeper cuts.

[mara]

i like the idea of crafting sonic environments where songs flow endlessly into each other without repeating noticeably often. and doing this has got me thinking about different types of environments one could craft

this is so well put.. curiously, sessions listening to ambient has always made me want to learn how to dj more than any other type of music , just so i can try to create this sort of thing.. i LOVE hikaru purpose's stuff and i usually just play their whole account through (runs about 30-40 minutes iirc) which always makes me want to extend that feeling further and further and further..

i feel like a huge part of my loving of any particular ambient has a lot to do with some proclivity i'll take to their sound design. in particular hikaru's sine waves just tickle my ears. those little bleeps fading in and out on the periphery, sometimes twinkling so brightly that i just want to grab them, sometimes stretching into a warm little pet across my head.

my most plentiful ambient experiences were when i was in college i guess, my algebra professor always had lectures at 9 am, and i am the sort to put off my homeworks til the night/s before they were due, so i would pretty frequently end up staying awake for a few nights in a row listening to SAW 2 on entirely too many stimulants. the blend of creepy, comforting, and focusing that came with that whole environement is forever etched in my brain with that music : it's 4 am, i'm nervous about not finishing my proofs in time, i'm kinda tweaking and having to fight bouts of staring at the walls .. that's what that album sounds like to me. fortunately it's long so i never had to stretch it much, i would just play it on loops. and sometimes eliane radigue to switch it up

i think ambient music , at my peak enjoyment of it, also has a quality where i perceive it more as environmental than (musical/focused/reception of "created work). which i don't really know what that means even but i think what i'm thinking of is when i play emeralds albums on long car drives and the road noise, the wind, my car's engine, my tinnitus, and the drones all blend in to one sort of sonic encapsulation of the moment.

time machines, by time machines (by coil) is also an album i have this sort of thing with , although then i try to listen to it mostly when i am very sleepless in bed, and i have the dull insomnia headache and the bed feels like the most cloying uncomfortable softness, and i stare at the ceiling and see if i time travel at all. i did once when i was 16 but also i might have just fallen asleep..

[watermoon]

wtf i'm in love with those sine waves

and that saw 2 story sounds like a living nightmare, honestly, though then again saw 2 can be a living nightmare if you let it be. it's maybe telling that what first comes to mind when i think about the album is its use in the show "jam", and how they really make these absurd scenes feel like something from a dream.
i also think about how, amidst the album's interweaving between pleasant and ominous and null… it just slaps you in the face with lichen, and at that moment it feels like the most beautiful thing you've ever heard… i dunno, i like it when ambient albums do things like that. like how an ending (ascent) comes out of nowhere when listening to apollo.

alsoooo… you mentioning djing gives me the chance to preach the good word of st.giga, which i've been itching to do because i'm absolutely fascinated with it conceptually. like, a new age satellite radio station that organized its programming to synchronize with the tide?! transitions between songs and moods that they intended to be so seamless that it felt like being enveloped in a womb of sound?! but then you'll be listening to nature sounds and some japanese poet will start reciting verse about different types of water?! sure, yeah, ok. i'm here for it, and i'm glad you're there.

despite being so long ago, a bunch of their tide of sound recordings were uploaded to archive.org a couple years ago, and it's truly a wonder that they got preserved. i think this airing gives a good example of what it's about, and it's the one that sticks with me the most. hearing it when i first did – during a heatwave in the dead of august with the a/c broken – and vibing to it as the music swelled to a radio-compressed mario's cafe by saint etienne was a bit of a religious experience…

[sinku]

I am a big fan of the ambient scene that span out of the industrial scene of 70s britain; Nocturnal Emissions, Rapoon, Zoviet France, ... There is a lot of awareness in what they created even at its most raw, a lot of elided purpose that you can catch onto when you look at one of these records as a whole. Also a lot of love, these circles and this scene was very tight-knit. A lot of the people who made it what it was died decades ago.

Spiritflesh
Invocation of the Beast Gods
Fallen Gods
Shouting at the Ground

[sinku]

I have found some new records and relistened to some old records and feel like sharing:

WANDA GROUP aka Louis Johnstone makes techno. but it is defiant, hostile techno that doesn't fit in with any boring normie german dub techno guys or any of the other stuff in the clubs. he is apparently a very angry shitposter too and got banned from twitter, but nobody could tell me what for. I bought a few of his records and am linking EARTH INSIDER and GET INVOLVED IN MY THROAT. I think they are very representative. The mixes are tight and crushing, but dynamic. It's not all bass, and theres a lot of intricacy living alongside what feels sort of brutish and primal. saturated drum samples and wonky beats and really thick bass, and all these samples and crackles and clicks from audio loops. it is choking and unforgiving and the nearest point of comparison is Burial's later work which seems like a shadow of this.

EARTH INSIDER
GET INVOLVED IN MY THROAT

i listened to siktoe navajoe today, which is this weird lofi ambient record that slides nicely in with the crowd of other sorta early 2000s late 90s ambient records like snd's microstoria. i dont know a lot about protman besides he follows me on twitter, which is neat. i will have to dm him to ask about production details of this and I will edit this post with whatever he tells me.

siktoe navajoe

EDIT, as promised:
It was made with a Casio SK-1 and Audiomulch. so cool ...